The nation's news audiences as much as its journalists suffered a harmful setback when the Supreme Court refused to review the case of two reporters who have been threatened with jail for declining to reveal their sources. The reporters had been questioned by a grand jury investigating the unmasking of an undercover C.I.A. officer whose husband had run afoul of the Bush administration. Intervention by the high court was needed to prevent an injustice to the individuals involved, and to the principle of a free and fearless press on which the nation was founded. ... It can be a crime, under certain circumstances, for a federal official to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert agent. It remains unclear whether the leaking of the name of the agent in this case amounted to a crime or simply an abuse of power by officials plotting political revenge. In either case, the reporters did nothing wrong, and yet somehow the case has evolved to focus on them. Now that the Supreme Court has punted, the reporters face up to 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal their confidential sources to a grand jury, unless the original trial judge or the prosecutor recognizes the larger offense here to the First Amendment. So far, at least, no one has been charged, other than the reporters, in an investigation that the prosecutor said was essentially wrapped up last October. One of the two reporters threatened with jail, Judith Miller of The New York Times, never wrote an article about the case, and this newspaper played no role in disclosing the agent's name. Still, Ms. Miller faces jail, along with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. Mr. Cooper did write about the agent, Valerie Plame, but focused on the motivations that may have lain behind her unmasking. Ms. Plame's name was published by Robert Novak, the conservative columnist, who has never appeared to be in jeopardy of jail time or even publicly ordered to testify. He has stood mute as the two reporters faced imprisonment for defending his rights as well as theirs. ... American history is full of examples of whistle-blowers who were able to inform the public of malfeasance only through reporters who were able to guarantee them confidentiality. The federal courts' assault on this tradition could have a chilling effect on their future willingness to speak up.

2005-06-27

USA verhandeln mit irakischen Rebellen

After weeks of delicate negotiation involving a former Iraqi minister and senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies. The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings. Details provided to The Sunday Times by two Iraqi sources whose groups were involved indicate that further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq. Despite months of American military assaults on supposed insurgent bases, General John Abizaid, the regional US commander, admitted to Congress last week that opposition strength was “about the same” as six months ago and that “there’s a lot of work to be done against the insurgency”. That work now includes secret negotiations with rebel leaders, according to the Iraqi sources. Washington seems to be gingerly probing for ways of defusing home-grown Iraqi opposition and of isolating the foreign Islamic militants who have flooded into Iraq to wage holy war against America under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The talks appear to represent the first serious effort by Americans and Iraqi insurgents to find common ground since violence intensified in the spring. Earlier informal contacts were reported but produced no perceptible progress. Zarqawi’s group, which has been blamed for many suicide bombings and beheadings, has not taken part.

Rumsfeld told NBC's "Meet the Press" that "meetings take place all the time." The Iraqi government is "not going to try to bring in the people with blood on their hands, for sure, but they're certainly reaching out continuously and we help to facilitate those from time to time," he said. Rumsfeld's remarks were part of a media offensive by the Bush administration Sunday aimed at reversing growing doubts among Americans that the war in Iraq can be won. President Bush is scheduled to address the nation Tuesday on the issue. Rumsfeld appeared on three different Sunday talk shows, Abizaid on two, and Vice President Dick Cheney on one. Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, who is on his first visit to the United States since he was chosen to head the interim government, also joined those arguing that the U.S. should maintain its policies in Iraq. They delivered a similar message: that despite the insurgency's ability to sustain its deadly attacks, progress was being made in Iraq and those trying to create chaos would eventually be defeated.

Und sonst: Bombing Attacks on Iraqi Forces Kill 38 in North. The attacks came as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld echoed remarks by his advisers in recent months suggesting that the insurgency could last as long as a dozen years and that Iraq would become more violent before elections later this year, New York Times.

U.S. Plans New Tool to Halt Spread Of Weapons. The Bush administration is planning new measures that would target the U.S. assets of anyone conducting business with a handful of Iranian, North Korean and Syrian companies believed by Washington to be involved in weapons programs, U.S. officials said yesterday, Washington Post.

U.S. Has Plans to Again Make Own Plutonium. The Bush administration is planning the government's first production of plutonium 238 since the cold war, stirring debate over the risks and benefits of the deadly material. The substance, valued as a power source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer, New York Times.

even as he has morphed from political operative to policy adviser, Karl Rove retains the instincts of the direct-mail specialist he once was in Texas. The verbal strike he aimed at liberals and liberalism during a speech to the New York Conservative Party on Wednesday night came straight out of the direct-mail manual: pithy, provocative and designed to energize one side by torching the other. Rove's flamboyant remarks -- in which he roused conservatives by saying liberals prefer "therapy and understanding" for terrorists instead of retaliation -- has put President Bush's top strategist back on stage. It's a place where he has seemed increasingly comfortable of late. ... the president's reelection victory liberated Rove and marked the beginning of a new chapter in his career. ... In his new role, Rove has become more visible and somewhat more accessible. He has made himself available to White House reporters and has appeared more frequently on television. ... Rove has become a bona fide celebrity within the Republican Party and one of the most sought-after speakers by GOP audiences. A White House official said Rove now can attract about as much money for a candidate or the party as Vice President Cheney, behind only the president -- an unprecedented capability for a White House staff hand. ... Congressional Democrats, most of whom supported Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, denounced the speech as deceitful and typical of the low-blow tactics they say have marked Rove's career. What is still unclear is how deliberate Rove was being in prompting an uproar with his comments. With public opinion on Iraq at an ebb and the president preparing to deliver a major speech Tuesday on the subject, Rove's remarks seemed in part an effort to redraw lines to how they were in last year's presidential campaign. Bush succeeded then by casting himself as the embodiment of strength and resolve, and portraying Kerry as the symbol of weakness and vacillation. ... The White House reaction to the uproar also bore the indelible stamp of Rove: no apologies and no retractions, and all engines in the GOP spin machine churning in concert. White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Bartlett defended Rove from the briefing room and on several morning television programs, and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman jumped in with customary aggressiveness. ... "I don't think anybody knows yet [whether] what he said the other night is a mistake," said Tad Devine, who was a top strategist in Kerry's campaign. "I will say it is calculated and deliberate. Karl for a long time has tried to position the Democrats as liberals, and liberals as weak, who don't want to defend America."

Und sonst: Bush's Credibility Takes a Direct Hit From Friendly Fire. Cheney's remark on the Iraqi insurgency's 'last throes' undercuts a calibrated message. For months, President Bush has struggled to maintain public support for the war in Iraq in the face of periodic setbacks on the battlefield. Now he faces a second front in the battle for public opinion: charges that the administration is not telling the truth about how the war is going, LA Times.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Associated Press has obtained dossiers on the military tribunals of 59 current and former detainees of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. These tribunals were held to determine if each detainee met the legal requirements for being classified as an "enemy combatant". Below is a summary of the types of documents contained in the dossiers, followed by some details on the contents of each.

The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Only a few other businesses have enjoyed greater prosperity in an otherwise fitful economy. ... "There's unlimited business out there for us," said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and now president of a thriving six-year-old lobbying firm. "Companies need lobbying help." Lobbying firms can't hire people fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to "move downtown" from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration. Once considered a distasteful post-government vocation, big-bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen's Congress Watch. Political historians don't see these as positive developments for democracy. "We've got a problem here," said Allan Cigler, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. "The growth of lobbying makes even worse than it is already the balance between those with resources and those without resources." ... "We're trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House," said John D. Hassell, director of government affairs at Hewlett-Packard. "There is an opportunity here for the business community to make its case and be successful."

It sounds nutty. But the best-known example works bewilderingly well. This is the Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia built on the contributions of thousands of readers (plus some minimal supervision from the host site). Readers are also fact checkers. To be sure, encyclopedias and newspaper editorials are very different literary forms. Contributors to Wikipedia share in some general way a commitment to accuracy. By contrast, strong disagreement is built into the concept of an editorial. Plenty of skeptics are predicting embarrassment; like an arthritic old lady who takes to the dance floor, they say, the Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than to be hip. We acknowledge that possibility. Nevertheless, we proceed. We're calling this a "public beta," which is a fancy way of saying we're making something available even though we haven't completely figured it out. ... Maybe a year from now a link for "wiki this page" will be as common on the Web as "printer-friendly" or "e-mail this article." Or maybe not.

"Freedom Fries"-Erfinder wird Irak-Krieg-Gegner

With its sprawling military bases and huge population of military retirees, eastern North Carolina has believed in the Iraq war, and sacrificed for it, like few other regions. But as summer heat has settled over the piney lowlands in recent days, a debate has unexpectedly come to life about a U.S. mission that is two years old and counting. New doubts and divisions have come into view. It started this month, when Republican Rep. Walter B. Jones, an original supporter of the war, said he had lost confidence in the effort and would sponsor legislation calling on the administration to more clearly define how, and when, it intended to bring the war to a close. Coming from the staunch conservative who renamed French fries "freedom fries" on congressional menus, the announcement shocked many. Back home, his change of heart brought denunciations and stirred trouble for Jones within his local Republican Party. But it also became clear that others in North Carolina's 3rd Congressional District were uneasy about the war, for one reason or another. Service members' families, watching violence surge, fear it will drag on indefinitely. Others worry it is damaging the military — or that it has been prosecuted foolishly.

Unabhängiges Bürger-TV in Kanada geplant

On June 15, Toronto-based Independent World Television (IWT) announced plans to launch a television channel by late 2007 that will incorporate citizens' voices into its programming mix. ... IWT is asking individuals to donate $50, preferably via the Web. According to the group's prospectus, if 500,000 people donate $50 apiece, IWT will be able to be sustain its first year of production. ... IWT plans to offer stories that today's mainstream media doesn't cover, such as the "Downing Street Memo," which alleged that the Bush administration made the facts fit its policy in the runup to the Iraq War. In most cases, according to IWT staffers, such stories aren't covered because of corporate and government pressures, direct or indirect. Even PBS, the group claims, is tainted by commercial and government interests through its corporate underwriting and government grants -- more today than ever before. ... As an example of the kind of fare IWT plans to offer, the program J-Pop will feature video footage shot by citizens, uploaded to the site via a BitTorrent application, vetted by IWT editors, and aired. "The model will be a network that's a marriage of professional and citizen journalism," says Matt Thompson, Internet director of IWT. "The time is right to apply [citizen journalism] to television." ... Finally, there's the philosophical challenge facing IWT: its model upends entrenched perceptions and habits about mass media news. And doing so can be a risky business. In 2000, for example, Chicago television station WBBM abandoned the popular "if it bleeds, it leads" approach dominating local newscasts, in favor of a more sober approach that spent time examining the nuances of a story. After nine months, though, the experiment failed, with the station's ratings plummeting to an eight-percent share, according to a report in Columbia Journalism Review. Indeed, one could argue that, given the success of networks such as Fox News and programs such as Lou Dobbs on CNN, people want spin in their news.

Bush's Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll. Increasingly pessimistic about Iraq and skeptical about President Bush's plan for Social Security, Americans are in a season of political discontent, giving Mr. Bush one of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and even lower marks to Congress, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll, NYT.

In my conversations and communications with editors, I sense plenty of confusion about the concept. There's enthusiasm about experimenting in some quarters -- about harnessing the power of an audience permitted for the first time to truly participate in the news media. But mostly I hear concern and healthy skepticism. This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media. We'll look at how news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept, and we'll approach it by looking at the different levels or layers available. Citizen journalism isn't one simple concept that can be applied universally by all news organizations. It's much more complex, with many potential variations.

The Pentagon awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military. "We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media," said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, a part of Tampa-based U.S. Special Operations Command. "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions." He said SYColeman Inc. of Arlington, Lincoln Group of the District, and Science Applications International Corp. will help develop ideas and prototypes for radio and television spots, documentaries, or even text messages, pop-up ads on the Internet, podcasting, billboards or novelty items. Treadwell's group was established last year and includes a graphic artist and videographer, he said. It assists "psyops" personnel stationed at military headquarters overseas. Col. Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command, which runs the Army's Special Forces, Navy SEALs and other elite combat units, said the contractors might help the military develop commercials in Iraq, for example, illustrating how roadside bombs meant for soldiers also harm children and other innocent civilians. ... Some previous Defense Department efforts in the field have been controversial. In 2002, the Pentagon abandoned its Office of Strategic Influence after reports surfaced, which the Pentagon denied, that it would disseminate inaccurate information to foreign media. After other agencies were criticized for hiring journalists to promote their policies, the Pentagon asked its inspector general to review its use of Fairfax-based Anteon International Corp. to run Web sites aimed at audiences in the Balkans and North Africa. The Web sites, known as the Southeast European Times and Magharebia, include articles from journalists paid by the Pentagon through the company, as well as articles translated from U.S. newspapers. That review is ongoing. Treadwell said there is no connection between the Office of Strategic Influence and the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, adding: "I have never approved a product that was a lie, [or] that was intended to deceive."

As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq—a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis—they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed—as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be—to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the US went "into battle," what David Kay and his colleagues finally proved afterward? Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary"—that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction—the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President's decision to go to war had long since been made.

U.S. Edits Global Warming Reports. A White House official repeatedly adjusts language in climate change reports already vetted by government scientists, watering down the impact of emissions on global warming, Wired News.

The news business is in trouble. Readership and viewership are declining, public trust is plummeting, and advertisers are beginning to wonder whether they're getting their money's worth. This has led people to think about what blogger and tech journalist Doc Searls calls business models for "news without newspapers," an approach to reporting and disseminating news that doesn't depend on layers of editors for publication, and big ads from carmakers for funding. Nobody's sure just how to do that yet. That's likely to change, though. Already we're seeing a lot of reporting from nonjournalists, in which the "reporter" is just whoever happens to be on the scene, and online, when news happens. Given the ubiquity of digital cameras, cell phones, and wireless Internet access, that's likely to become more common, making the kind of distributed newsgathering seen during the Indian Ocean tsunami the norm, not the exception. Quite a few bloggers are moving beyond opinion journalism into firsthand reporting. On my own InstaPundit.com blog, I feature firsthand reports, often with photos, from places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. My "correspondents" are correspondents in the original sense--people who correspond--rather than in the modern sense of people with good hair and a microphone. Other bloggers have broken stories from Iraq (involving both alleged war crimes by U.S. troops and large antiterror marches left uncovered by American media), from the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and from Canada's government corruption scandals. Multimedia coverage is taking off, too. At the BlogNashville conference last month, I demonstrated the power of quick-and-dirty digital video by putting together a 15-minute Web documentary on the proceedings and posting it the next day, all done with the video-camera feature on my under-$300 Sony digital still camera. Now San Francisco blogger Bill Quick is using the same sort of equipment to cover local crime and politics. ... Pajamas Media, a blog-news venture I'm involved with, is recruiting a network of independent journalists around the world (and especially in less-democratic countries) and working on ways to support them financially, legally, and technologically. Others are working on news-aggregation technology that will automatically gather blog posts on particular topics, allowing people to customize their news.

Iran Preparing for Advanced Nuclear Work, Officials Say [das ist ja mal wieder eine genaue Quellenangabe]. Iran has plans to install tens of thousands of advanced centrifuges at its huge underground nuclear plant near the central city of Natanz, which eventually would enable the nation to enrich uranium nearly twice as fast as anticipated, LA Times.

Shortly after a 91-year-old man was revealed last week as the answer to the 30-year-old mystery of the Watergate affair, President Bush cast the scandal as something from the distant past. "A lot of people wondered … who 'Deep Throat' was, including me," Bush said after news broke that former FBI official W. Mark Felt had been the source leaking Watergate details to the press. "It would kind of fade from my memory, and then all of a sudden, somebody would pop it back in. Some story would reinvigorate that period." And yet, far more than Bush has publicly acknowledged, Watergate and its aftermath have exerted a strong influence on the policies and attitudes of the president and others now in the White House — some of whom had front-row seats for the scandal as members of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Vice President Dick Cheney, who worked in the Nixon White House and served as chief of staff to President Ford, has spoken of using his current position to restore powers of the presidency that he believes were diminished as a result of Watergate and the Vietnam War. By withholding details of his energy task force meetings and advising Bush to aggressively take the reins of power after the contested 2000 election, Cheney has tried to rekindle a broad view of executive authority. Bush was a student at Harvard Business School when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974. He watched as his father, chairman of the Republican National Committee and one of Nixon's most visible defenders, butted heads with a press the elder Bush believed was out to get the president. Today, an arm's-length relationship with the press, a highly controlled message and a restrictive interpretation of public records laws are the norm at the Bush White House. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a Nixon aide who also served as chief of staff to Ford, tried to stop Congress' post-Watergate broadening of the Freedom of Information Act. The act requires the government to disclose certain records to citizens. Working with Cheney, Rumsfeld persuaded Ford to veto the legislation, according to declassified documents obtained last year by the National Security Archive at Georgetown University. Congress overrode Ford's veto. Today, Rumsfeld often expresses his distaste for leaks and for the press' handling of scandals such as the revelations of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib. Reflecting on Watergate last week, Rumsfeld made clear that he was not ready to declare Felt a hero. ... For the current president, Watergate reinforced a set of feelings that already ran deep in his family, said Peter Schweizer, co-author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty." "They have always believed that secrecy and privacy were important for leadership, because they allow decisions to be made without fear of leaks or outside influences," said Schweizer, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. To the Bush family, Watergate was "a personal failing by Nixon, not an institutional failing," Schweizer said. "Their view is that weakening the executive was the wrong solution to the problem."

All ten commissioners believe, however, that it is critical to educate the public on the issue of terrorism and what can be done to make the country safer. They would like to do so by reaching out, in bipartisan pairs, to communities around the country, encouraging a national conversation on these critical issues. In the absence of such an effort, they are concerned that there will be insufficient public examination of how the lessons learned from the terrorist attacks can be used to shape public policy. The perils of inaction are far too high - and the strategic value of the Commission's findings too important - for the work of 9-11 Commission not to continue,

The officials said the 10 commissioners, acting through a private group they founded last summer, will present a letter within days to Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff, asking the White House to allow the group to gather detailed information from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies about the government's recent performance in dealing with terrorist threats. Commissioners say they want the information to prepare for a series of public hearings scheduled to begin here on Monday and to draft a privately financed report that will evaluate the government's counterterrorism policies in the wake of the commission's final report last July. The moves, which may not be welcome at the White House or among Congressional leaders, represent an unusual effort by members of a high-profile federal commission to retain their political viability and to lobby for their recommendations long after their official investigation came to an end. "We're going to ask a lot of questions," said Thomas H. Kean, who was chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and is now a board member of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a private educational and lobbying group. "There are a lot of our recommendations that have not been implemented." Mr. Kean said that with terrorist groups threatening new attacks on American soil, "we don't have a lot of time left to act."

Bill Would Give CIA More Power Overseas. The CIA would be given authority to coordinate all human intelligence activities overseas, including those carried out by Pentagon and FBI personnel, under legislation proposed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill, Washington Post.

Films Capture Iraq's Brutal Truth. Vivid documentaries like The Dreams of Sparrows challenge U.S. media portrayals of the Iraq war -- and spark an unusual indie revolution, Wired News.

Guard, Reserve monthly death toll at high".Thirty members of the Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve died in the Iraq war in May, matching the highest toll for any month of the war, USA Today (AP).

Pentagon muss Abu-Ghraib-Folterbilder herausrücken

A federal judge has ordered the Defense Department to turn over dozens of photographs and four movies depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. "These images may be ugly and shocking, but they depict how the torture was more than the actions of a few rogue soldiers," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "The American public deserves to know what is being done in our name. Perhaps after these and other photos are forced into the light of day, the government will at long last appoint an outside special counsel to investigate the torture and abuse of detainees." The court order came in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights to obtain documents and materials pertaining to the treatment of detainees held by American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Attorneys for the government had argued that turning over visual evidence of abuse would violate the United States’ obligations under the Geneva Conventions, but the ACLU said that obscuring the faces and identifiable features of the detainees would erase any potential privacy concerns. The court agreed. "It is indeed ironic that the government invoked the Geneva Conventions as a basis for withholding these photographs," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU. "Had the government genuinely adhered to its obligations under these Conventions, it could have prevented the widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay." The court order filed late yesterday requires the government by June 30 to reprocess and redact 144 detainee abuse photographs provided by Sergeant Joseph Darby to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. ... To date, more than 35,000 pages of documents have been released in response to the FOIA lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at To date, more than 35,000 pages of documents have been released in response to the FOIA lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia.